After a hundred years, salmon swim by the Eiffel tower again

Atlantic salmon have returned to the Seine river reports the AFP. Absent for nearly a century, the salmon have returned entirely of their own volition: no reintroduction efforts were undertaken.

“There are more and more fish swimming up the Seine,” said Bernard Breton, a top official at France’s National Federation for Fishing, told AFP. “This year the numbers have exceeded anything we could have imagined: I would not be surprised if we had passed the 1,000 mark.”

Atlantic salmon used to be plentiful in the Seine, but disappeared in the early 20th Century due to dams and chemical pollution. The reason for the salmon’s return is that Seine is cleaner. In the late 1990s France began a large-scale effort to clean-up the Seine, including a new water purification plant.

Cleaning up the river has brought back other species, as well. The record of fish in the Seine jumped from a low of four species in 1995 to 32 species today.

The Seine begins in northern France passes through Paris and empties in the English Channel.

(11/14/2008) A fifty-one inch long Chinook salmon, found dead during a salmon survey in Battle Creek by the Department of Fish and Game (DFG), is probably a record for the state of California say Department biologists.

(06/03/2008) Chinook salmon face a one-two punch. They have disappeared from several rivers in the western U.S. largely because of human interventions and some populations are threatened or endangered. Numbers of Chinook in California’s Central Valley have dwindled by 88 percent in the past five years, a loss that closed fisheries for 2008 and may cost California’s economy $167 million, according to the state Department of Fish and Game. On top of all this looms a second impact: These salmon will be in hotter water still because of climate change.

(12/13/2007) Parasitic sea lice infestations caused by salmon farms are driving nearby populations of wild salmon toward extinction, reports a study published in the December 14 issue of the journal Science.